Last week, Amazon confirmed (as if proof was needed) just how popular its AWS platform really is. Now we know a bit more about how companies are using it.

Today we’re releasing our Q1 2015 AWS Scorecard, highlighting the most popular AWS products, instance types, regions and more. The data is based on tens of thousands of AWS instances under our management. As a reminder, 2nd Watch is an original AWS Premier Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner. Our clients include Conde’ Nast, Diane von Furstenberg, Lenovo and Yamaha, among others.

Here are the major AWS usage trends from Q1:

According to our analysis, companies are moving more big data and analytics applications to AWS. This is based on an almost 50% increase in the number of medium EC2 instances used in Q1, which increased to 29% from 19% in Q4.

Windows-based instances in the cloud are also growing. No longer a mere developer playground, CIOs are moving production apps onto AWS. Windows-based instances grew sharply in Q1, from 34% in Q4 to 76%, while Linux instances declined from 66% to 24%.

Cloud-based security products once again topped the list of most purchased third-party products for AWS deployments. The top four products were: Alert Logic Log Manager for AWS, Alert Logic Threat Manager for AWS, AlienVault Unified Security Management for AWS and Barracuda Web Application Firewall. This trend makes sense given that more companies in highly regulated industries are moving data and applications to AWS.

An overwhelming majority of companies are using S3 Storage (97%), EC2 (82%) and SNS messaging (70%). Close behind was SQS message queuing service (61.4%, up from 46% in Q4, ‘14) and RDS relational database (46.9%). As for databases, the second most used database service was the EC2 SQL Server standard (16%).

It will be interesting to see how this data changes in future quarters. For example, we will be watching to see what effect, if any, Amazon’s continued investment in Redshift and EC2 Container Service availability have on the way customers use AWS. In the meantime, the Q1 Scorecard data backs up what we’re hearing from customers: big companies are moving more business-critical data and applications to the public cloud. And that’s a trend we don’t see changing anytime soon.

Download the Q4 Scorecard for a full run down of the usage trends we’re seeing.